George Clayton Johnson, Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 86

Image

George Clayton Johnson, in 2006, wrote “Logan’s Run” with William F. Nolan. His work often addressed aging and mortality.CreditDith Pran/The New York Times

By Daniel E. Slotnik

Dec. 27, 2015

George Clayton Johnson, who wrote memorable episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” the first televised episode of “Star Trek” and, with William F. Nolan, the novel “Logan’s Run,” often addressing aging and mortality in his work, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 86.

The cause was cancer, which had spread from his bladder to his prostate, his son Paul said, adding that Mr. Johnson also had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Mr. Johnson, a contemporary and colleague of writers like Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont, was recognizable on the science fiction and comic convention circuits by his unruly beard and eccentric clothing. He was living a bohemian life in Southern California when the producer and screenwriter Rod Serling chose to develop one of his short stories for his new series, “The Twilight Zone.”

The story became “The Four of Us Are Dying” (1960), in which Harry Townes plays a con man able to assume another’s face at will.

Mr. Johnson worked on six more episodes of the original “Twilight Zone,” many of them poignant takes on senescence. In “A Game of Pool” (1961), Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters play a life-or-death game of billiards; in “Ninety Years Without Slumbering” (1963), an old man thinks his life is inextricably linked to the ticking of a grandfather clock; in “Kick the Can” (1962), residents of an old-age home revert to childhood when they play that game. (“Kick the Can” was later adapted as a segment, directed by Steven Spielberg, of the 1983 theatrical feature “Twilight Zone: The Movie.”)

Mr. Johnson and Jack Golden Russell developed a story about a Las Vegas casino heist that became the 1960 movie “Ocean’s 11,” starring Frank Sinatra and other members of the so-called Rat Pack: Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop.

“It was Las Vegas before Circus Circus moved in and turned it into a family affair,” Mr. Johnson recalled in 2003 in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “It was night life most glittering, with the biggest stars and nice clothing and croupiers and money flying back and forth.”

“Ocean’s 11” was remade with an ensemble cast including George Clooney and Brad Pitt in 2001, followed by two sequels.

Mr. Johnson helped Mr. Bradbury adapt his story “Icarus Montgolfier Wright” into an animated short that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1963.

In 1966 he wrote “The Man Trap,” the first televised episode of Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek,” which was broadcast on NBC that September. In the episode, a shape-shifting alien infiltrates the Starship Enterprise to feed on crew members and nearly kills Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner.

The next year Mr. Johnson and Mr. Nolan published “Logan’s Run,” a novel about a dystopian society in which young people lead hedonistic lives until they turn 21, when they must be killed. Mr. Nolan wrote sequels, but without Mr. Johnson.

“Logan’s Run” was made into a movie, directed by Michael Anderson and written by David Zelag Goodman, in 1976. It starred Michael York and Jenny Agutter and included a cameo by Farrah Fawcett. In the movie, the age at which people were killed was changed to 30.

“This ‘Logan’s Run,’ which is quite different from the novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton, is harmless fun enlivened by a couple of sequences that are as good as the entire film should have been,” the critic Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote.

Mr. Johnson’s literary manager, Whitt Brantley, said that at his death he had been developing a sequel, tentatively titled “Jessica’s Run,” about Logan’s fellow runner.

George Clayton Johnson was born on July 10, 1929, in a barn, by his account, outside Cheyenne, Wyo. His parents, Charles Edward Johnson and the former Laura Mae Duke, separated when he was young, and he spent much of his youth living with relatives and friends.

He said he had stopped attending school by the eighth grade and had asked his mother for permission to run away when he was 15. He served in the Army as a telegrapher and a draftsman from 1946 until 1949, most of the time in Panama, and then studied architecture at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University).

Mr. Johnson moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and married Lola Brownstein, with whom he lived in the Pacoima neighborhood. She and his son survive him, as do a daughter, Judy Olive; two grandchildren; and a half-sister.

Mr. Johnson’s musings on death were sometimes comforting. In “Nothing in the Dark,” a 1962 episode of “The Twilight Zone” that he wrote, Death comes for an old woman (Gladys Cooper) who has barricaded herself inside her apartment to avoid him.

Death, played by Robert Redford, delivers these consoling lines: “You see? No shock. No engulfment. No tearing asunder. What you feared would come like an explosion is like a whisper. What you thought was the end is the beginning.”

He then leads her, by the hand, outside and into the sunshine.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: George Clayton Johnson, 86, Sci-Fi Writer . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Sign up for the Watching Newsletter

Get recommendations on the best TV shows and films to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.